New Orleans       Frequently, we bat around the terms “chilling” and “prior restraint,” when observing actions by governments, corporations, the super rich and others attempting to bully their way forward, suppress speech, or intimidate resistance.  We trumpet from the roof beams the need to resist, stand up, protect our values, save democracy, and whatever, blah, blah, blah.

I know I do that on the regular.  Then I found myself for three days working on an expansive organizing plan to push back and turn the tables on Trump’s Big Bad Budget Bill and its cynical rip-off of low-income families Medicaid and food stamps.  On the fourth day, after reading an article in the paper, I took a deep breath and sucked in the reality of the situation, realizing that we would be courting the whirlwind.  No one would invest in something that faced the likelihood of a full-fledged assault. No one would be willing to weather the storm and take the heat.  We would likely be alone and crushed, out spent and outgunned.  I figuratively pinched myself, and cut and pasted the program memo until it was just a smaller, quieter, measured set of pilot programs to prove the concept and convince others to come on board, if it proved out.  I had blinked and preemptively restrained myself and been chilled.

The wake up calls for me was reading the tragic modern-day tale happening to Media Matters.  I don’t pretend to really know the group or follow them closely.  David Brock, their founder and long time chief, had always confused me, as he switched from Clinton Whitewater warrior to freedom fighter for liberal Democrats against Trump.  Despite being personally and professionally skeptical, I respected their work and the scale at which they operated, so was sobered by their eminent demise.

They are being hit by a one-two punch.  As a self-appointed watchdog and disinformation resister, they had done a piece on Elon Musk’s Twitter/X allegedly “…that ads appeared on X next to antisemitic and pro-Nazi content.”  That report and stuff from Musk’s own mouth, cost the X about $75 million in lost revenue, they claim.  Musk sued them and threatened their funders to boot, who had poured a quarter billion into their coffers between their founding in 2002 and their most recent 2023 disclosures.  After Musk sued, attorneys general in Texas and Missouri jumped in against them with their own investigations, costing them $2 million to fend off these states.  Musk has played whack-a-mole with them in courts, suing them in US, then Ireland, then Singapore, and appealing when stopped in those courts.  Media Matters has supposedly spent more than $15 million on cases.  Their own lawyers began to dun them as well.  Then the Federal Trade Commission under its new Trump appointee begins investigating them for inducing others to boycott Twitter/X.  Internally, staff were laid off, conflicts on strategy and response are intense, funders have gone underground, and morale is in the crapper.  Vegas probably wouldn’t take bets that they would survive, though they maintain that they will.

Of course, they are not alone.  Universities are paying hundreds of millions to get Trumpers to go away, even as it ruins their reputations.  Media companies have settled solid suits and paid Trump millions to turn the heat down.  Planned Parenthood is iced out of Medicaid payments, and on it goes.  People, organizations, and institutions are folding like cheap suits.

Heck, I hardly own a suit and wouldn’t know how to fold one.  These guys are running scared even with fat bank accounts and endowments when private litigation and state power comes after them.  We’re empty pockets and small potatoes next to any of them.  If targeted once again, we would be lucky to make it past the first round.

This is the price of contending with autocracy and the filthy rich.  The poor will pay most dearly, but all of us will be assessed the costs as well, whether we’re ready to admit now, as I’m doing, or later, when the blows rain down and are unremitting.